It certainly sounds like a good idea on paper. Vince Vaughn’s “Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights – Hollywood to the Heartland” features four stand-up comedians and assorted FoV bringing the funny. Well, at least it’s supposed to bring the funny. The catch is that the comedians…um, let’s just say that the Blue Collar gang need not bother checking their rear view mirrors. The movie has its good points – the comedians seem to genuinely like each other, and there is no macho bullshit behind the scenes – but the vast majority of stand-up footage falls flat,…
Author: David Medsker
Renny Harlin should seriously consider having his name legally changed to Alan Smithee. That way, whenever some movie is released that credits the infamous pseudonym as its director, Harlin could at least say, “Nope, that wasn’t me,” and it would be plausible that he’s telling the truth. Yes, “The Covenant” is that bad. Granted, we’re talking about one of the best bad-movie directors of all time (“Cutthroat Island,” “Driven,” “Deep Blue Sea”), so no one was expecting much from him to begin with…and he still under-delivered. Harlin’s 1996 movie “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” one of the best bad movies ever…
Russell Gewirtz’s path to Hollywood will surely invoke the ire of aspiring screenwriters everywhere. He never went to film school – in fact, he has a degree in computer science and even passed the bar – and he never toiled in obscurity for years on end. Instead, he wrote a script, a little thing called “Inside Man,” and watched it attract an A-list cast featuring two, two-time Oscar winners. Bullz-Eye caught up with Gewirtz and talked about his new requirements for who gets cast in his movies, and how even a bad movie (in his mind, if not the mind…
Let me guess: you think you already saw this movie last year, when it was called “The Cave,” right? To that, I have two things to say: guess again, and why on earth did you see “The Cave”? That movie was terrible, but I digress. “The Descent” is one of the creepiest movies you’re going to see this year or any other, a suspenseful, claustrophobic horror flick that is like a hellish melding of “Aliens” with “The Hills Have Eyes.” Indeed, “The Descent” is everything I was hoping the recent remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” would be, and then…
If you were to make a list of the quintessential John Hughes movies, the holy trinity would likely be “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club,” and “Pretty in Pink.” In terms of the overall quality of those movies, well, two out of three ain’t bad. “Pretty in Pink” earns its cred for having the best soundtrack ever assembled for a Hughes movie – ask BE writer Will Harris, and he will convincingly argue that it is the birth of what became the modern rock movement – but let’s be honest: “Pink” doesn’t hold a candle to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Even…
There are about a hundred things wrong with “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Its ‘we’re freestyling and isn’t it cool’ attitude is really ‘we’re throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks’ in disguise. Will Ferrell reveals new limitations as an actor with nearly every performance. (He is a mouse among comedy men in this cast, that’s for sure.) Lastly, the movie’s idea of what passes for funny is, more often than not, insulting. And yet, there’s something oddly entertaining about it, even when the movie itself doesn’t seem to know which bits are working and which…
“John Tucker Must Die” was well on its way to becoming the next great black comedy, but then something unexpected and unfortunate happened: it found its heart. Usually, movies benefit from having heart, but here, it strangely feels like a sellout. In fairness to all concerned, I’m not sure exactly how you fix it in such a way that everyone gets what they deserve and also comes out of it all relatively unscathed. Much like the great movie “Election,” you find yourself rooting for everyone, which makes justice a difficult thing to dispense. Until that time for justice comes, though,…
Heaven help us if anything resembling “13 Tzameti” (the ‘t’ is silent and the ‘e’ is soft, so it sounds like an Italian dish) takes place in real life. The events in Gela Babluani’s low-budget, grainy black & white thriller may have been shot on the cheap, but few things you’ll ever see come with a steeper price than the one that the lead character pays here. The story begins with Sebastien (George Babluani), a handyman who’s barely scraping by in order to make ends meet for him and his family. He’s working on a job fixing the roof of…
“Monster House” is arguably the scariest movie that has ever been targeted to children. There were multiple children around me who said to their parents, “Mommy/Daddy, I’m scared.” (The parents, God love ‘em, clearly wanted to toughen up their kids and made them watch the whole thing, though that’s a far lesser crime than the woman who brought her seven-year-old daughter to see “Clerks II” earlier in the day.) Luckily, the movie is also funny, sweet, and more than a little sad. The boys act like boys, the girls act like girls, and the adult figures, of course, treat the…
The greatest compliment that can ever be paid to a documentary that covers a certain genre of music, or quadriplegic sport, or class of sub-zero animal, is that even people who have no interest whatsoever in that music/sport/animal will find plenty to enjoy in the movie about that topic. Put “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” in the same category. It’s not flawless in its backstage/pre-show banter-to-concert footage ratio, but it finds a way to endear itself to people that would otherwise have nothing to do with a movie about a hip hop block party. People like me, for example, who are…